Cooking Rotation
I fell off of doing cooking updates when the Bad Tireds hit, but obviously we've still been eating. Brad has been doing the bulk of the cooking for some time; I'm hoping that if I start to feel better I can pick up the slack again. We plan the menu together, sometimes well in advance so I can order groceries if needed or we can freeze food for later, I find/format a recipe for him if there isn't a clear recipe, make a shopping list, and either go to the farmers market with him or send him in with a list. More rarely we go to the grocery store together; usually he goes there alone. We really get much of our food and almost all of our produce from the farmers market nowadays, and it's easier to send him for dry beans than for produce, since I'm very picky about produce, so if I'm picking one it's the farmers market!
I'm also doing a fair amount of ordering through Santa Cruz Local Foods, which is wonderful; the pickup location is in walking distance and I can stagger grocery orders throughout the week, picking up fresh salad greens for the second half of the week on Tuesday, and items to go into our weekend batch cooking on Friday, as well as staples like milk and eggs. I need to remember to order near the beginning of the cycle, or high-demand items might be sold out before I get to them! So right now our main shopping days are Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and our batch cooking usually happens on Sundays.
We're also trying to interleave dedicated declutter weekends into this, which after trying a two week rotation was too onerous (because we had to batch cook for two weeks instead of one every other week) so we're trying a three week rotation. (One week normal, one week a double-batch cook that gets frozen, and one week dedicated to working on the house. We can then do a double batch of soup on one week and a double-batch of stew or chili on the second, which spreads out the cooking.)
I'm also doing a fair amount of ordering through Santa Cruz Local Foods, which is wonderful; the pickup location is in walking distance and I can stagger grocery orders throughout the week, picking up fresh salad greens for the second half of the week on Tuesday, and items to go into our weekend batch cooking on Friday, as well as staples like milk and eggs. I need to remember to order near the beginning of the cycle, or high-demand items might be sold out before I get to them! So right now our main shopping days are Tuesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and our batch cooking usually happens on Sundays.
We're also trying to interleave dedicated declutter weekends into this, which after trying a two week rotation was too onerous (because we had to batch cook for two weeks instead of one every other week) so we're trying a three week rotation. (One week normal, one week a double-batch cook that gets frozen, and one week dedicated to working on the house. We can then do a double batch of soup on one week and a double-batch of stew or chili on the second, which spreads out the cooking.)